Miniature displays are also well known and may involve a miniaturized version of planar or stereoscopic 3D technologies which display a distinct image to each eye. With increase miniaturization and incorporation into eyeglasses design, head-mounted displays (HMDs) have enjoyed an increasing popularity for applications ranging from fighter pilot helmet displays and endoscopic surgery to virtual reality games and augmented reality glasses. The 3D HMD display technology has numerous extensions including Near-to-Eye (NTD)—periscopes and tank sights; Heads-Up (HUD)—windshield and augmented reality—and immersive displays (IMD)—including CAVE, dome and theater size environments. The principal employed varies little from that of the 1930 Polaroid™ glasses, or the barrier stereoscopic displays of the 1890s, despite extensive invention related to the active technology to produce each display has occurred over the past twenty years. As applied to small displays, these techniques evolved to include miniature liquid crystal, field emission, OLED, quantum dot and other two-dimensional matrix displays; variations of virtual screen and retinal scanning methodologies. Other approaches include scanning fiber optic point sources such as disclosed by Palmer, U.S. Pat. No. 4,234,788, compact folded, total internal reflection optical displays disclosed by Johnson in U.S. Pat. No. 4,109,263. These inventions have provided practical solutions to the problem of providing lightweight, high resolution displays but are limited to providing a stereoscopic view by means of image disparity.
But, object visual accommodation is not incorporated in the previous inventions. A solution to the problem of accommodation for all displays was disclosed by A. C. Traub in U.S. Pat. No. 3,493,390, Sher in U.S. Pat. No. 4,130,832, and others. These inventors proposed a modulated scanning signal beam coordinated with a resonantly varying focal length element disposed in the optical path between the image display and the observer. These solutions are bulky, and do not scale for practical usage.
It is also well known in the field that wavefront-based technologies, such as digital phase and diffractive holography, may at high-resolutions, convey a limited amount of accommodation data. However, their limitations including coherent effects, impart significant specular and other aberrations degrading performance and inducing observer fatigue.
Alternative approaches where a data-controlled, variable focal length optical element was associated with each pixel of the display were such of experimentation by this inventor and others, including Sony Corporation researchers, in Cambridge, Mass. during the late 1980s. In 1990, Ashizaki, U.S. Pat. No. 5,355,181, of the Sony Corporation, disclosed an HMD with a variable focus optical system.
Augmented reality had in origins at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the 1960s and involved in a translucent HMD with head-orientation tracking in a wall projection immersive environment. The ‘virtual image’ in the HMD did not have accommodation, and the immersive environment did not include spatially-tracked, portable audience elements with multiplicative effects.
Virtual and Augmented Reality systems for enabling one or more users to interact with a virtual world comprised of virtual world data have been the subject of extensive experimentation and development from the earliest “heads up” fighter pilot displays to the intricate, ‘serious game’ world of defense simulations. These systems historically have a multiplicity of data sources including maps, GPS and orientation-enabled cameras, a computer network, and computational devices which enable the display to the user of real and virtual scenes and objects, often not only updated in real-time, but also predictively plotted in future time. Increasingly these systems have object or face recognition, enabling responsive and predictive displays.
Despite the improvements during the past decades, the significant problem of providing a low cost, highly accurate visual display with full accommodation remains. One of the principal limitations has been the inability of sequentially resonant or programmed variable focal length optics combined with scanning configurations to properly display solid three dimensional pixels, orthogonal to the scanning plane. Another limitation is the inability of the observer's eye to properly and comfortably focus on rapidly flashing elements. Numerous inventions have been proposed which have generally been too complicated to be reliable, too expensive to manufacture, without sufficient resolution, accuracy, stability to gain wide acceptance.
A further problem solved by the innovation of present invention is the method and apparatus to comfortably and useful carry and use an audio-visual display on one's person.
The present invention solves these problems, particularly related to the portable multiphasic design, augmented reality, environmental dynamics and the accurate display of 3D pixels.